BPX

BPX is an acronym for the Business Process Expert which describes internal and external individuals or groups of people in an organization, who bridge the gap between IT and Business professionals, and serve as "mediators", "translators", "facilitators" or "marriage counselors".

The BPX is on the one hand tech savvy and knows sufficiently enough the implications of the business process’ requirements on performance, data volume, network traffic, existing landscape and the criteria for selecting adequate technologies like user interface, programming language, application platform, security, etc. On the other hand the BPX understands the business process, the organization’s strategy and legacy, drives innovation within the organization and uses best practices that go beyond the scope of single departments and the organization. In addition a BPX needs to be aware of the history of the organization, the politics and the corporate culture. For this a BPX needs soft and hard skills, be fluent in both tech- and business-terminology, as well as have deep modeling knowledge.

For the BPX multiple other names are in use, most of them addressing a subset of the BPX' tasks and skills. The most common names are Business Analyst, Business consultant, Functional Consultant, Technical Consultant or go-between (from the book "The Geek Gap")

The role of the BPX encompasses:
* bridging the worlds of IT and business processes.
* usually modeling rather than coding
* having a deep knowledge of core business processes and business-unit operations
* having a technical aptitude

External links

* [http://bpx.sap.com/ BPX Community] is SAP's community of business process experts
* [http://www.geekgap.com/ The Geek Gap] book website of the authors